


Streetear

by ridorana



Series: the roots of santalum [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 00:23:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11817321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ridorana/pseuds/ridorana
Summary: "Chop for your thoughts?"In a city where Ffamran feels he isn't heard, a friend lends his ear.He soon learns Archades is no place for friends.





	Streetear

The sunset’s final rays make themselves known in clouds that rib crudely across the sky like coeurl claws. In the last moments of the sun, the skyline of Archades glistens and burns. A ruby, many would call the Empire’s tones cast alive in a gilded moment, gone as quick as a breath. Archades wears the imitation well enough to those swayed by the temptation of beautiful things.

From his perch atop an anonymous tattered hovel, Ffamran gazes at the jut of the Empire’s red silhouette and rather likens it more to a freshly-picked scab, one that he can’t stop digging his nails under.

Somewhere behind him, Ffamran hears Jules approach. The wooden ladder’s rungs creak as the Vulgar heaves himself atop the hovel, and Ffamran only spares a hint of a glance, the briefest blink of dark lashes, before gazing numbly back at the skyline.

They rendezvous here like this often now, a seamless dynamic. Jules is an arm’s pace away as he sits along the roof’s edge, gangly legs hanging over the dilapidated awning. He starts rolling a cigarette. With a wry grin, Ffamran wonders whose skeletons Jules dragged out of an unassuming Vulgar’s closet to get his hands on tobacco in the Lowers. 

Jules is not a talker often, Ffamran finds. He listens, mostly. Which is well and good enough, as the young Bunansa has enough words of his own built up in the fire behind his lips today. When Jules hands him the cigarette, Ffamran takes one drag and only one, blowing smoke in the face of the Empire and handing it back. The visual alone holds some catharsis, but Ffamran's shoulders are rife with tension he yearns to relieve in some form of trouble.

Which is why he comes here. More often, as of late. No one notices. He’ll return home later, smelling of filth and street-grit and cheap tobacco, and no one will notice that, either.

“You grace us with your presence again, Ffamran. The mere wake of your sandalwood steps gentrifies our very streets. However will we repay you for rebuilding Lower Archades in but a billow of silk and brocade?”

Jules’ voice beckons Ffamran from his venomous reverie, and the Bunansa son holds out his arm to his uncouth companion, fingers gapped apart in a wordless request - and at this, Jules grins and tucks the cigarette in between pristine fingers. Ffamran notes the brush of skin that practically coats his own with grime. He’s told Jules several times the importance of basic hygiene but at this point he's discovered the cur is hard-pressed to tame.

“Clearly I’m not doing a fine enough job with that if you’ve yet to wash your hands since the last eve I saw you.”

Jules laughs, and the sound is a rasp - he truly is amused, and it does naught to soothe the hairs standing on the back of Ffamran’s neck. His laugh is unsettling.

“Hands don’t stay clean down here for long, my friend. You’ve much to learn about the ways of the Lowers.”

“Spare me, if you would be so kind,” is Ffamran’s short response, the edge of his voice as sharp as the unsightly blades he’s had to spar with as of late. His hands still blister from today’s lesson and his shoulders ache. He has a few choice words for his _superior_  (Zargabaath, was it?) but he’ll leave them to mouth behind his helm on the morrow.

“Ah, yes, how could I forget - you simply play the role of a Vulgar when it conveniences you. Hardly suitable, this grime for ah - what would you call yourself, then? A Leading Man?”

Ffamran blows another sigh of smoke into the sky. The tobacco is dry and old on his tongue. It doesn’t even feel good to smoke. He exhales into the dying light fading fast into muted blue, and regards the words with a grin.“My, you’re feeling awfully wordy tonight.” A beat. “But a Leading Man, eh? You said it, not me.” It doesn't sound bad on his lips, but he indulges Jules no further.

“Chop for your thoughts?”

Here, Ffamran chortles at the familiar line. It was funny then too, moon cycles ago, a sweltering eve in his stumbling first impression of the Lowers - a lone folly fueled by anger, rebellion, the unsightly forbidden, an aching curiosity. He had laughed in the face of this very hollowed youth then, lines carved beneath his eyes far before his years, teeth yellowed and night-whiskers prickled about his face like a greasy cactoid. And he laughs now, relaxing into the familiarity.

Yet laughter aside, Jules’ ear has proven to be a welcome one as of late. When Ffamran’s short bout of amusement dies in his throat, he’s quiet again. Heat behind his teeth rises as he’s reminded what beckoned him to this very rooftop tonight in a fit of anger and incredulity. Silence stretches, and then,

“My dear father returned from his _business trip_ about a week ago.”

“Ah, yes. _Business_ , as always. And how is dear father doing?” Jules’ legs swing to and fro over the awning, and below them, oil-lamps light up the tattered streets of Lower Archades. They sway in a breeze the young Bunansa doesn’t feel any relief in.

Ffamran finds the words jumbled together in a Malboro knot behind his lips. He’s thought them through many times in the past few days in the hollow of his own headspace, and there’s been no soundboard to rehearse the lines that sound incredulous to even him. Ffamran aches to tell someone.

He won’t let Jules know he’s the only someone he has to tell, won’t let himself accept that Jules already knows that, most like.

“He’s talking to himself.”

Jules flicks the smoldered butt of the cigarette away; it falls like a dying glowbug in the growing darkness, and he grips the edge of the hovel's roof. His eyes are unwavering on Ffamran’s form, a silence that beckons him to continue, but Ffamran doesn’t.

“Talking to himself?”

Ffamran’s sigh through his nostrils is long. “Aye. Earlier this week I wandered to his wing to seek a writ of his approval for an Akademy trip to the Orchestra,” here, Jules interrupts him with a snort that would rival that of even the most jovial seeq, but Ffamran continues, “when I happened upon him rattling off to thin air. Like a gods-bedamned lunatic. Spouting nonsense into the void of his study.”

"Rattling on about what?"

Ffamran has to catch his breath at merely the memory of what he's overheard this past week. He is shaken, still, and dredging the words up brings them into a reality he does not want to confirm.

"If only I knew. It's nonsense, what scraps I manage to hear. Conversations, one-sided. It's the weather, it's literature, it's the economy, it's - history, philosophy, it's everything and nothing."

Jules’ voice is quieter than he’s used to. It’s almost gentle. Almost. “Where did he go for this trip, Ffamran?”

Ffamran sifts through his memory, thoughts rifled in the wake of retelling this tale. “Some ilk of Jagd, if my understanding rings true. Where in specifics, I know not. He would not disclose.” Ffamran laughs bitterly here. “Took enough lock picking to merely confirm even that, in the dead of night weeks ago. Old man can keep his subordinates from his files but hard-pressed to do so with me.” His words die in the hatchling din of the Lower’s nightlife. “Alas, his notes proved vague if the chickatrice-scratch weren’t hard enough to decipher.” Ffamran never would understand the correlation between being a scientist and having the world’s most abhorrent handwriting, yet they ring true with each one he’s forced to meet.

“Set foot in Jagd, your old man?” Jules presents for clarification, and Ffamran nods.

“Took his sweet time, to boot. A moon’s cycle, nearly. Slips me where he got approval for  _that_  stretch of leave.”

“And returns without so much as a hello to you, opting only to speak to thin air since returning, eh? Am I getting this right, or should I add clogged ears to the list of what filth that ails me?”

Ffamran nods, though he doesn’t want to. “Indeed. And here we are.” He isn’t sure where here is, but he’s there, and he doesn’t want to be. He wants another cigarette now, just to do something with his lips that isn’t speaking. Without needing to ask, Jules rolls another, and Ffamran finds himself grateful for his friend, uncouth though he is.

“And here we are.” A somber agreement, though dissociated. Jules says nothing more, having filled his quota of words spoken for a day. A filthy tongue licks along the paper to be rolled by filthy hands. Jules does him the honor of a first drag, going so far as to light it for him. Ffamran hums in thanks, exhales, passes it.

They sit on the edge of a hovel high in the Lowers, and gaze up at Archades’ nightlife glittering into view in the distance, a luxurious twinkle, a blueish-yellow hum in a purple haze.

One would say it’s beautiful. Ffamran likens it to a bruise that won't heal.

 

—

 

Ffamran wakes the next morning to the shatter of glass against a wall.

He pads out into the hallway towards the kitchen, eyes laden with sleep, hair mussed. He hugs the monogrammed robe about his person and peers around the corner. Cid is there, half-dressed, spectacles discarded along the countertop, fists clenched at his sides. His shoulders heave with the exertion of his own breaths, an anger Ffamran has never seen his father wear. He hasn’t noticed Ffamran yet, back to him over the marble counter. The teenager dare not breathe.

“A suspension?!” The words ring shrilly in the open kitchen space, and the morning light pooling through is pale and ghostly. Cid’s fists ball into his hair, what little he has left (when had he started losing that, Ffamran wonders). “Word travels faster than blood spills in these wretched walls, Venat. You’ll come to learn that. We make haste, then, with this time they’ve given me. Given _us_ , the fools.”

Cid freezes for a moment. “What’s that?” His father turns his head to the left, facing - nothing, absolutely maddeningly _nothing_ , yet his gaze is held fast to thin air as if he were speaking to another hume.

And then he straightens and rounds on Ffamran. The Doctor’s mouth is agape somewhat, mirroring his son’s.

“Ffamran. Did I wake you?”

Ffamran swallows. It’s too early for anger but he feels it anyway. “Depends. When you launched a dinner plate into the wall or when you started roaring off into thin air like an indignant Seeq?”

Cid’s expression is a poorly-masked pantomime of composure. His posture straightens and he adjusts his spectacles before clearing his throat. His tone is a different page altogether. “Ffamran, it’s late into the morning. Akademy starts in shy of ten minutes. Hadn’t you best be off?”

Ffamran doesn’t say he was planning on sleeping through the first half of his day, because he isn’t anymore. Without a word, he spins on his heel and returns to his room.

When he leaves, he heads towards Lower Archades. The only face that will miss him up there is his professor’s, when he’s tallied off for yet another absence.

It’s getting increasingly harder to care.

—

The Alley of Muted Sighs in the Lowers wears its name well in the light of early morn. Humes old and young are splayed about the edges of its streets, tangled in sleep or merely just exhaustion. It’s hot and the day has barely begun.

Jules is not hard to find. Ffamran wonders if he ever sleeps, pushes the thought from his head, opting instead to wear a grimace that’s feeling disturbingly more comfortable to don as of late.

“Quite a face. With a nasty frown like that you’ll be playing the part of a true Vulgar in no time, Master Ffamran.” Jules has been expecting him, Ffamran is sure of it now, and he feels anger and confusion roil in the pit of his belly.

“Only thing truly vulgar I see here is you, Jules. Liken me to a fool, then, do you? If it’s information you sought, why you may have merely just asked. Would save you the trouble of playing me for a friend in your tired street games.”

Jules’ smile is hideous and all yellow teeth, and Ffamran feels like an idiot indeed. “Fool? Nay, not at all. A generous gentry you prove to be, Master Ffamran. A lowly streetear such as myself need not lift a finger to get valued word from you.”

He's seething, fists clenched at his sides, and Jules pays him no mind.

“Business is business, and any solid word of Draklor will keep me fed for ages. Word of an estranged Doctor Cid and an unapproved trip to Jagd signed by a forged hand? Why, I’m set to be fat and happy through the season, and I’ve you to thank.”

Ffamran spits his words like a sour serpentwyne in the dusty alley heat. “Will it then? Good, I was getting worried I’d have to toss down my dinner scraps to you.”

“Your benevolence knows no bounds, Ffamran. Would that the rest of Archades could mimic such charity, we all might hold hands and sing together one day.”From somewhere high in the distance, a Tsenoble bell rings grandly, eight strokes. Even from down here, the sound is near deafening. Jules lowers his chin at the Bunansa. “Why, it’s time for your morning lute lesson, is it not? Duty calls and all that. I’d hate to keep you. Hadn’t you best be off?”

He swallows dryly, and finds no words. Wise decision, that - he decides. The ears of Lower Archades are a prying and apt unwanted audience, and the vexing smile on Jules' face is an ugly twisted thing.

Ffamran hates it here. Uppers, Lowers, it matters not. He does not belong here.

When Ffamran Mied Bunansa turns to leave Lower Archades, he does not return, not for many years.

 


End file.
